I downloaded and installed the module. Although I’ve read some documentation, it all assumed you were already familiar with OG, so I was a bit surprised when the first thing I had to do was to select which content types were OG-aware. Ok, fair enough. I don’t want separate content types for restricted and non-restricted information. In my mind, restriction is an attribute of a node, not a separate type. However, the second setting was to select a content type as group node. Why? I don’t necessarily need a separate home page for a group and it sounded like an either-or choice. Ok, so I created a ‘default’ custom content type ‘Group Node’ and selected that one.

The rest of the settings sounded logical and straight forward. Then, I wanted to add users. To my astonishment I couldn’t find where to add a user to a group. Finally, after some searching on the Drupal website I came across the answer (sorry, forgot to notice the post): make the Group Details block visible and select the link with the number of members. Second surprise: it’s impossible to add existing users if you don’t know their exact usernames. After scrolling through the endless number of OG add-on modules, I gave up. There were only 20 to 30 users that would apply, so I simply opened a MySQL browser, generated the query (select name from users join users_roles where users.uid = users_roles.uid and users_roles.rid=<number of the role I wanted>) and copy pasted the list of names into the Add member textarea. Adding some commas and I was up and running.

On to the group page and in for another surprise: as admin (user 1) , I was unable to find the group page of the closed group. Yes, I took the book’s advice and created a separate user and assigned group ownership to that user, but I assumed that user 1 would be added automatically. Not! Ok, so admin was added as group administrator.

More surprises: I added both the Dutch and the English version of the (currently only) restricted page to the restricted group. The group ‘home page’ was set to be language neutral, but each version of the page has been set to the respective language. Yet, both versions showed up on the home page. So I need another add-on to get to where I was before.

On the other hand, assignment has to be done by hand. I haven’t figured out yet how to grant permission to another user to just restrict content to one particular role and I guess I need to build a custom View to see which nodes are restricted, i.e. build my own administrative views. As said before, it’s easy to make a mistake and grant the wrong role to a user. I also haven’t looked into the Drupal forum to see if role-based restrictions are possible. Just had a quick look: the Forum Access module and Content Access are recommended for restricted forums (the first one also allows the setup of moderators).

The site evolved from a relatively static site, where all pages were hand-crafted to a simple Drupal site last year. The main reasons for switching were a hard disk crash in our server and a growing need to simplify the way content was added to the site. In the current version, I’m assisted by a web editor, who is able to convert much of the incoming information to relevant content types. So the initial goal was reached.

During this year, the need for private pages came up. This was a long standing request, that I couldn’t solve easily with the previous version of the site, but with the help of the Content Access module was fairly simple to set up in Drupal. Right now, users need to subscribe to see the private pages, and a registration request is manually verified by me before granting it. After all only members of the Society are allowed to register.
This is a tedious task and prone to errors as I discovered yesterday: more than 6 months ago I accidentally granted a user the Administrator role, fortunately without much problems. Also, since I need to do this manually, it might take a while before I find some time to doing it.

So the next version will need to have the following functionality:

• Automatically verify if the user registration request comes from a legitimate Society member. I already have some additional fields in place and I have an Excel sheet with relevant information on current members. So I need to either find a module or build one myself that is capable of matching a request to the Excel information and automatically accept the user when his credentials are found. After that he or she needs to be automatically granted the ‘members’ role.
• There will be several user groups on the site. All users will be ‘members’, but some will have additional roles, varying from ‘teachers’ to ‘moderators’ (of a forum or other website parts) to ‘web editors’ (who can add different kinds of content). At first, being careful, I’d like to be the only one to grant the additional roles, but when things get out of hand, I might want to delegate some of the responsibility.
• There is restricted access for parts of the site. For starters, there will be a ‘members-only’ section with Pages and Stories. In the future, this might be extended to include a forum.
• There is a long standing request from the teachers group for a restricted forum. Since the number of teachers is small, it’s ok to manually assign a ‘teacher’ role to the relevant users. However, I need a complete list of teachers for this.

This is it for now. I’ll add more requirements if they show up in the course of this write-up.

That didn’t stop me from working on a new theme, which is almost done by now. So with a few days to spare, I decided to look into some other issues, such as the best way to provide private content on the website.

The book talked about Organic Groups, which I’ve come across before, so I decided that this was the right time to look into it. After all, I do want to create more social networking functionality on the website and be able to hand off some of the content management work to others. I’ll write up my experiences in subsequent posts. They won’t be literary pieces of prose, merely my sentiments as I try to achieve my goals.

The answer: a few days ago I setup an SMB share on my home folder, with access for only my user account, no access for ‘everyone’. That resulted in a permissions change on my home folder, even after removing the SMB share.

The solution: sudo chmod o+rx [home folder]

Digging aroung showed an error in the Apache log:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted

I found the answer here: http://drupal.org/node/76156. I added an appropriate ini_set line to settings.php and suddenly my admin/build/modules page showed up.

Yes, it was uploaded without errors and yes, I could switch off maintenance mode and yes, I could see my pictures and enter the site admin mode etc. However, there was one album that didn’t show its thumbnail. Rebuilding the thumbnails produced a hang half way through. Editing the album wasn’t possible, it produced just a blank page. Editing the other albums worked fine. I could even see the contents of the faulty album if I just selected it from the list of albums shown in the sidebar when viewing another album.

After several hours I found the culprit: the original image I used for the custom thumbnail was 1Mb, 2000+ x 1500+ pixels that had to be resized to 150×150. I didn’t notice because it was done smoothly on my laptop. After resizing the ‘original’ thumbnail to 200×150 and uploading it to the corresponding directory (g2data/plugins_data/modules/thumbnail/<nr>/ the thumbnail rebuild continued until the end. The thumbnail was restored and the album was totally functional again.

However, today I spend more than an hour figuring out why I couldn’t get the CAPTCHA module to produce an image on a Webform form.

Finally, after googling around I found the answer: I can’t set it in the edit mode of the form, only in the VIEW mode. So much for subtleness.

No idea what’s wrong locally.

I guess I need to settle for manual change when moving from local to production and vice versa.